In a set of interviews in 1992 with I. Jack Good and Donald Michie[2], both colleagues of Turing during his Bletchley Park sojourn, I led them to discuss their knowledge of Turing's homosexuality:
Good: ... when we walked down King's Parade [in 1947] that was the first time I discovered that he was homosexual. That was when he said that he was going to Paris to "see a boy". It was obvious that he was admitting or proclaiming his homosexuality.
Lee: He was very open about it?
Good: Yes, at that time.
Michie: He certainly wasn't during the war, for some of us, including both of us, were quite unaware ... I took quite seriously his engagement to ...
Good: Joan Clarke?
Michie: At the same time I was thoroughly aware that the whole problem of converse with women was a great burden, and problem, for him. And I recall him explaining to me once, I didn't think he was homosexual as a result of this conversation, because I [saw him through] the eyes of a rather priggish young person (me) who had just left school and just experimenting with female company - I had grown up to look on women as undereducated relative to men, which to put it that way, which in perhaps to some extent in those days was the case. But he put it in a very grotesque way to me and said "you know, the problem is that you have to talk them", "If you take a girl out, you have to talk to her. And then so often when a woman says something, to me it is as though a frog has suddenly jumped out of her mouth." It was an extremely unpleasant metaphor.
Lee: Peter Hilton [1991] quotes you, Jack, as saying "It was fortunate that the authorities did not know during the war that Turing was a homosexual, otherwise the Allies might have lost the war".
Good: Yes ...
Michie: Oh but that's absolute nonsense, because Bletchley had some flamboyant homosexuals - Peter's ideas that security people were down on homosexuality itself, is absolute nonsense. I can't think how he could write that. The most flamboyant case was Angus Wilson - he later became a very successful novelist, and he had a boy friend called Beverly, and these two, Angus was about that high [indicating small] with flowing yellow hair (I remember it went white later) and Beverly (I forget his second name) was very "weed-like", very tall. They could be seen shambling along the horizon, a daily sight, as they took their walk around lawns after lunch.
Good: I never knew that. I know that Angus Wilson ran around the pond in the nude, when he had a nervous breakdown.
Michie: He was also said to have poured ink on his head on another occasion, it was the first sign he was going nuts again. I had not heard about the nude bit.
Good: I assumed they were down on homosexuality.
Michie: I think that's a retrospective coloring actually. Because Henry Reed3, you remember Henry Reed, you knew he was a homosexual didn't you?
Good: No!
Michie: I must have know him better than you. He was always complaining to me about how his current affair was, or was not, prospering.
Good: Well, I was in digs with him, and with David Rees ... He never said anything about his affairs.
Michie: I had some links to a more literary set. There was a literary set in Bletchley, and I was fresh from a wholly arts education. There were these two cultures - the mathematicians' culture was another - I worked all my time in the mathematicians' culture but I retained, certainly for a year or two, quite a lot of social links to various classics Dons and literary people like Henry Reed. And in that group, things like whether Henry Reed was a homosexual - everybody knew. And the same with Angus Wilson.
Good: I had no idea.
In 1952 Turing was convicted by a British court for his involvement in "unnatural acts" and was required to take female hormones in an effort to rid him of his preferences. The physical result was the development of Turing's breasts, and apparently his accompanying depression. This was the time of Turing's life when he was studying the chemical theory of morphogenesis. His "experimental methodology" was what Newman termed his "rules of the game" in which he attempted to solve problems using only the materials immediately at hand or which he could construct in his mind. Turing died by his own hand in 1954 by eating an apple dipped in strychnine. It is unknown whether this was an experiment which had an unfortunate result or whether his death was intentional. Either way, the world lost a mathematical genius at the height of his intellectual power.
It is of course important that some efforts be made to verify the correctness of the assertions that are made about a routine. There are essentially two types of method available, the theoretical and the experimental. In the extreme form of the theoretical method a watertight mathematical proof is provided for the assertion. In the extreme form of the experimental method the routine is tried out on the machine with a variety of initial conditions and is pronounced fit if the assertions hold in each case. Both methods have their weaknesses. (Manchester Mark I Programming Manual, 1951)
Biographical
Addie Robin. 1992. "Memories of Alan Turing", Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 15, No. 1, pp.59-60.
Aspray, William F. 1980. From Mathematical Constructivity to Computer Science: Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and the Origins of Computer Science in Mathematical Logic, Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison WI.
Britton, J.L. (ed.) 1992. Pure mathematics; with a section on Turing's statistical work by I.J. Good, North-Holland, Amsterdam.
Campbell-Kelly, Martin. 1981. "Programming the Pilot ACE: Early Programming Activity at the National Physical Laboratory", Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 133-162.
Carpenter, B.E., and R.W. Doran (eds.) 1986. A.M. Turing's ACE report of 1946 and other papers, MIT Press, Cambridge MA.
Herken, Rolf. (ed.). 1988. The Universal Turing machine: a half-century survey, Oxford University Press, Oxford .
Hilton, Peter. 1991. "Working with Alan Turing", Mathematical Intelligencer, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 22-25.
Hinsley, Sir Harry H., and Alan Stripp 1993. Code Breakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 312 pp.
Hodges, Andrew. 1983. Alan Turing: The Enigma, Simon and Shuster, New York.
Huskey, Harry. October 1984. "From ACE to G-15", Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 350-371.
Lavington, Simon. 1980. Early British Computers, Digital Press, Bedford MA. See Chapter 5: "The ACE, the `British National Computer'", Chapter 8: "The NPL Pilot ACE".
Michie, D. October 1968. "Machines that Play and Plan", Science Journal, pp. 83-8.
Michie, D. 3 March 1977. "The Disaster of Alan Turing's Buried Treasure", (Letter to the editor), Computer Weekly, p. 10.
Michie, D. 1980. "Turing and the Origins of the Computer", New Scientist, Vol. 85, No. 1195, pp. 580-583.
Newman, M. H. A. 1955. "Alan Mathison Turing, 1912-1954", Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 1, pp. 253-263.
Randell, Brian. 1980. "The Colossus", in Metropolis, N., J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota. 1980. A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, Academic Press, Inc., New York. pp. 47-92.
Ritchie, David. 1986. The Computer Pioneers, Simon & Shuster, Inc., New York, Chapter 5.
Slater, Robert. 1987. Portraits in Silicon, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, Chapter 2.
Turing, Sara. 1959. Alan M. Turing, W. Heffer & Sons, Cambridge (UK), 157 pp.
Wilkinson, J. H. 1980. "Turing's Work at the National Physical Laboratory and the Construction of Pilot ACE, DEUCE, and ACE", in Metropolis, N., J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota. 1980. A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, Academic Press, Inc., New York. pp. 101-114.
Whitemore, Hugh. 1987. Breaking the Code, (A Play in Two Acts), Samuel French Ltd., London and New York.
Significant Publications
Carpenter, B. E. and R. W. Doron (eds.). 1986. A. M. Turing's ACE Report of 1946 and Other Papers, MIT Press, Cambridge MA.
Morris, F. L. and C. B. Jones. April 1984. "An Early Program Proof by Alan Turing", Ann. Hist. Comp., Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 139-143.
Turing, Alan M. 1937. "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem[4]", Proc. London Math. Soc., Vol. 42, pp. 230-65.
Turing, Alan M. 1948. "Machine Intelligence", submitted to National Physical Laboratory, reprinted in Meltzer, Bernard, and Donald Michie (eds.). 1970. Machine Intelligence 5, Halstead Press, John Wiley & sons, Inc., New York, pp. 3-23.
Turing, Alan M. 1950. "Computing Machinery and Intelligence"5, Mind, Vol. 59, pp. 433-460.
Turing, Alan M. 1972. Proposal for the Development of an Electronic Computer, Nat'l. Phys. Lab. Report, Computer Science 57, London (reprint from original with foreword by D. W. Davies.)
Copyright J. A. N. Lee, September 1994.